>>8064839

>people act differently based on whether or not they believe in free will

Maybe for an hour, then they go right back to doing what they've always done.

This article doesn't seem to understand anything it's trying to say.

>This article doesn't seem to understand anything it's trying to say.
prove it instead of making baseless claims

It's incoherent. For one, it doesn't set out clear definitions of what it means by free will and determinism. It flip-flops between an apparent neurological nonexistence of free will and the related but different lessening of autonomy and culpability due to external circumstances. It ends the article by apparently (though you can't be sure, since it isn't very clear) saying that, oh, we can choose and analyses our responses to what we are presented with as a result of our higher intellectual capacity... or something. So apparently we have "practical free will," whatever that means.

Just another trash piece of journalism misusing and misrepresenting more complicated scientific and philosophical investigations and evidences. Lebit's time experiments are presented as almost conclusive evidence that free will is an illusion, despite the fact that these aren't universally assented to even in his own field.

>Article theres no such thing as free will
>The year is 2016
this is so embarrassing.

>Lebit's time experiments
where can I read up on this?

Not sure, but the guy's full name is Benjamin Lebit. I'm sure there's a decent amount of stuff on the web.

You sound like a womon

alright, so basically schoppy's "we cannot will what we will but we can act upon what we will"

There's no reason free will couldn't exist, and it obviously does.

Why are determinists so autistic?

"Man can do what he will, but he can also torture what he will." - Sam Stiller 2016

I think I remember Nietzsche saying that both those who advocate Free Will, and those who advocate Determinism, were equally suspicious in their motives. I remember his reasoning being pretty interesting.

It was in Beyond Good and Evil, I'll have to find the passage again.

Sam Harris strikes me as an intellectually static person. Every book I've read of his and in every interview he has the exact same take on things, and in debates just reiterates his view instead of taking anything on board. His email exchange with Noam chomsky (that he put on his website for some reason) is very demonstrative of this.

Just an observation, not saying if he's right or not.

>don't care at all about what other people need to live

>muh feewings are more important than true insights

Well, if you're right, you can't get any right-er. Just Saiyan.

I don't think anyone would try to argue that Harris isn't repetitive. Does that even matter, though? More a critique of him than anything he's ever said.

I think pairing Stuart Kauffman's Investigations and Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop could change your perspective on matters like this quite a bit. Cosciousness is a vast, complex network that feeds into itself, accepts input and produces output. But there are emergent properties that cannot be quantified in a system this incredibly complicated. Thats free will.

Not an argument.

It just speaks of him being intellectually compromised in his egotistical stubborness, there's few great thinkers in history who didn't adjust their views even considerably over their careers

This isn't a comment on wether he's right or wrong. I don't know why this guy gets so much attention, science enthusiasts claim he invented a secular morality but he's just repeating what Bentham and Mill said two hundred years ago. On free will his view is equally unoriganal. Is he only popular because he's good at speaking to the media?

Fred was had a generally determinist outlook but didn't see the profit in spreading it. At least he did in his middle years, I remember reading an aphorism in HATH where he described a waterfall and how if we knew all of the variables we could calculate precisely where each droplet of water would fall.

But being human, all too human, the full truth, the full set of variables for many questions are beyond our grasp.

Welcome to pop-philosophy, a field full of charlatans and terrorists.

>Is he only popular because he's good at speaking to the media?

If you have to ask you know the answer

It's often the person who popularizes something that takes most of the credit (at least among the hoi polloi). How many people on the street do you think have ever even heard of Bentham? Mill?

The book is, thus, valuable as a compact and compelling expression of an opinion widely shared by eminent scientists these days. It is also valuable, as I will show, as a veritable museum of mistakes, none of them new and all of them seductive—alluring enough to lull the critical faculties of this host of brilliant thinkers who do not make a profession of thinking about free will. And, to be sure, these mistakes have also been made, sometimes for centuries, by philosophers themselves. But I think we have made some progress in philosophy of late, and Harris and others need to do their homework if they want to engage with the best thought on the topic.

I am not being disingenuous when I say this museum of mistakes is valuable; I am grateful to Harris for saying, so boldly and clearly, what less outgoing scientists are thinking but keeping to themselves. I have always suspected that many who hold this hard determinist view are making these mistakes, but we mustn’t put words in people’s mouths, and now Harris has done us a great service by articulating the points explicitly, and the chorus of approval he has received from scientists goes a long way to confirming that they have been making these mistakes all along. Wolfgang Pauli’s famous dismissal of another physicist’s work as “not even wrong” reminds us of the value of crystallizing an ambient cloud of hunches into something that can be shown to be wrong. Correcting widespread misunderstanding is usually the work of many hands, and Harris has made a significant contribution.

-Daniel Dennett

>American philosophers

Why is he always so fucking smug?

>the hoi polloi
Can you get any more pretentious than this?

Seriously though, a Sam Harris thread on Veeky Forums? Garbage, mods need to delete this shitty thread or move it to some other shitpipe like Veeky Forums or Veeky Forums because this isn't literature.

>Garbage, mods need to delete this shitty thread or move it to some other shitpipe like Veeky Forums or Veeky Forums because this isn't literature.

Can you get any more pretentious than this?

You can be Sam Harris, for starters.

youtube.com/watch?v=KuNsu-15HYM

are you on kyle's side?

Veeky Forums literally btfo

Based Dannett